Administrative practices as institutional identity: bureaucratic impediments to HE ‘internationalisation’ policy in Japan
This paper explores how bureaucracy impedes the implementation of higher education (HE) policy at Japanese universities. Administrative systems employ Weberian legal-rational bureaucratic practices that are central to the institutional identity of a university. Rather than the means
to internationalisation and reform in general, these systems themselves become the end, usually in direct opposition to not only innovation and change but, indeed, the university mission itself. After first outlining the macro-level processes and policies of the internationalisation of Japanese
HE, I take an ethnographic approach to illustrate the micro-level administrative practices and assumptions at the university, framing them within the social theory of bureaucracy to allow for comparison with HE in other parts of East Asia and worldwide. As a way forward, I propose we borrow
theories on social entrepreneurship to potentially resolve the challenge of embedded administrative practices and static institutional identities, a bureaucratic ‘utopia of rules’ [Graeber, D. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.
New York: Melville House].
Keywords: East Asia; Higher education policy; Japan; administration; bureaucracy; ethnography; internationalisation
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: The Institute for the Liberal Arts, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan
Publication date: 02 January 2016
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